Science: Bill & the Little Beast

In the chill of the desert dawn, a weird airplane, painted as white as a
new refrigerator, was wheeled out of a hangar at Edwards Air Force
Base, California, and towed at funeral-slow speed toward the level,
eight-mile runway of Muroc Dry Lake. The plane was the Douglas X3, a
radical, dangerous experiment in sustained supersonic flight. Most of
the small gallery of onlookerspilots, engineers and Douglas
executiveshad seen it many times before, and presumably most of them
had confidence in it. But few could have escaped some twinges of
misgiving...